An Unsung Hero
by Exactlywhat
Summary: "He was the Batman." - I watched the Dark Knight Rises again, and as I was watching the end, the part where they unveil the batman statue, I realized, Gordon was sitting there, and, likely, someone would have made a speech. Why not Gordon? (DKR spoilers)


Title: An Unsung Hero Rating: K+ Continuity: Dark Knight Rises (Spoilers, just in case) Notes: I watched the Dark Knight Rises again, and as I was watching the end, the part where they unveil the batman statue, I realized, Gordon was sitting there, and, likely, someone would have made a speech. Why not Gordon?

* * *

_A hero. An unsung hero, for so long. For years, we viewed him as the 'bad guy,' used him as the scapegoat, blamed all our troubles on him. Because we _could_. Because he was faceless, because he couldn't stand up and show us who he was, show us that he was innocent. And we knew he _wouldn't_. _

_I do know that what he did was technically illegal. The police, the law, they are there for a reason, and that should not be ignored. _

_But we were in a dark time. Our police were just as corrupt as the city, and we needed someone, needed him, to come, to break us out of our stupor, to show us what was wrong. He saved us. Saved us from ourselves. Saved us from things we never truly understood, things we would have had no chance of stopping ourselves. _

_He did it time and time again. He stopped Doctor Crane, when he put his hallucinogen in the water mains. Stopped the Joker, when he was killing for fun, holding our city in thrall, stilling us in terror. Stopped Harvey Dent, when he became bitter and tried to avenge his love, and when he was going to kill my son. _

_He cleaned up the streets. Saved us from criminals we knew were there, but did nothing to stop. Then he ordered me to lie, to make it possible to do something about it. _

_I did, and it was the hardest thing I had ever done. But I knew what he was. I knew what he was doing. So I did as he asked, as he ordered. We turned our city around. Cleaned the streets. Put criminals behind bars. _

_And he, our unsung hero, took the fall, so that we could do what needed doing, and then disappeared. He let us do our job. He fell back into the shadows he had come from, and we accepted it. We accepted that this man, the one who had done so much good, had turned. Had murdered, had killed, had gone bad. _

_Because we didn't want to believe differently. Because he could take it, and we couldn't. He told me, that night, when he ordered me to place the blame on him, that he was doing it because it was what Gotham needed. That _he_ was what we needed. We needed someone to blame. We needed a fall guy. Because we couldn't handle the truth. We couldn't handle the fact that our white knight, our hero with a face, the one we trusted, was dark and stained as all of us. _

_And we couldn't accept that our dark knight, the one who stayed in the shadows, the one who wore a mask, was the pure one. The one who did good. _

_There is a quote that was often bandied about by my fellow officers, back when I was young. A quote from the Bible. John 15:13; "greater love has no one than this; that a man lay down his life for his friends."_

_And our hero, our dark knight, our guardian, did more than this. He put down not just his life, but his _whole_ life, everything he had, for us, a whole city. Millions of people, and not one friend. He had no friends. He had no loved ones. He was a man in a mask and cape, separated by shadows and lies. _

_Yet he did it. He gave his life for us. First, in simply doing what he did. Then, last month, with his life. He died for us. To save millions of souls he didn't know, to save strangers. _

_To save strangers that had blamed him, had spit in his face, had rejected him time and time again. He did what needed to be done, regardless of what punishment it meant for him, to save all of us, those who had named him an enemy, a villain._

_I never wanted to know who he was. I never asked, never hinted, and he didn't tell. He didn't need to. Because I knew who he was. I always did. Some of us did. And we all do now. _

_He wasn't just a man in a mask. He wasn't some vigilante who fights for some misplaced sense of vengeance. He wasn't, as we all thought in the beginning, a villain._

_He was a guardian. Guarding us from ourselves. Guarding us from what we had not the courage, or the strength, to face. Guarding us with his life. _

_He was a hero. He was a man who gave all he had for the lives of strangers. _

_He was the Batman._

. . .oOo.

Gordon glanced down at the paper folded in his hands. It was worn slightly around the edges, from where he had folded, opened, and folded it again. He had written it a week ago, in preparation for this day. The mayor had asked him to speak at the unveiling of Batman's statue.

He had leapt at the chance. The city knew now. The country, the _world_ knew now. But he had to speak. Had to _say_ it, to cement it in the world's mind, to mark history. To make sure it was known.

Batman was a hero. More than a hero.

And now, the world knew.

His only regret was that it came at the cost of a thousand lives, including that of the hero.

It was always after they had died that people realized. After they had fallen, sacrificed everything, that the truth was realized.

"And now, Commissioner Gordon has prepared a speech..."

Slowly, the old Commissioner stood, paper wrinkling in his fist. The statue of the masked man loomed over them all, cowled face frowning down. But... whoever had made it captured... something. The frown wasn't directed at the observer, but an invisible, absent enemy. Bane, the Joker, Dent, Crane... Faces flashed through Gordon's memory as he turned to face the cameras.

He took a breath and lifted the lined paper. Simple notebook paper, his messy scrawl spread in black ink between the lines. He had debated typing it up, but had decided not to. It seemed... offensive, somehow, to make it prettier for the sake of it looking good. Batman had liked showmanship, true, but... it always had a purpose. No, showing off, looking fancy, was not fir now. Now was a time for honoring a hero.

The paper fluttering slightly in his slightly wrinkled grip. There was still a bruise, yellow and green and purple, spreading over the back of his hand, faint beneath the shadow of his sleeve. One of the many remainders left from his tumbling journey in the back of the bomb transport truck.

A deep breath, and one more face to flash through his memory. Batman's, a tiny, slightly bitter smirk in place, as he looked down on Gordon from inside the Bat._ "A hero can be anyone. Even a man doing something as simple and reassuring as putting a coat around a young boy's shoulders to let him know the world hadn't ended."_

Bruce Wayne, one of the least likely men for _him_ to be. A player, a trouble-maker, a spoiled rich boy. And the man who had sacrificed himself to save a city of strangers.

Another breath, and a camera flashed, making him blink. "A hero," he started, and took another breath. "An unsung hero."

At least until now.


End file.
